“Your mess for less”
This is how outsourcing could be summed up: the process of acquiring from an external supplier products or services that would otherwise result from the company’s own direct production and internal management activities.
The principle is simple: let others do what they do better than us, so as to reduce costs and improve the quality of the services or intermediate products we need, freeing up the resources required to develop what constitutes the company’s real business.
Richard Blanford, managing director of Fordway, explains the advantages of outsourcing:
- It makes it possible to shift costs from capital to operating expenditure, allowing organisations to increase their budget and helping long-term financial planning;
- It allows the team to concentrate on strategic projects, reducing unproductive time;
- It provides access to additional professional skills. Companies often lack staff with the skills to support the broad spectrum of modern IT systems and relentless technological change. This greater complexity of the overall landscape requires continuous training, and specialist skills are very expensive, so few companies can bear the cost;
- It allows the company to benefit from optimised infrastructure and technologies by implementing ITIL processes, working to standards such as ITIL / ISO2000 for IT service delivery, ISO27000 for information security and BCI best practices for business continuity. Maintenance and upgrades are simplified, and disaster recovery and business continuity are supported.
In the same way, cloud computing makes it possible to shift costs from capital to operating expenditure, as well as offering unlimited capacity, almost total flexibility and greater efficiency.
However, there are two fundamental differences between managed cloud services and what we might call vanilla cloud. With a vanilla cloud service, a third party provides capacity in the data centre and tools for delivering support.
Vanilla cloud does not include specific security applications or anything else designed for the particular needs of businesses. Many cloud services cannot manage every aspect of infrastructure and applications.
